Memes: The Spicy Origins
We all need our daily fix of spicy memes. The dankest of the dankest in the whole internet.
Like a crossfitter who hasn’t stand on a balance ball while hoisting a barbell for over a day, or a vegan who hasn’t told anyone she’s a vegan in fifteen minutes, we would feel wailing emptiness should we go on the day without scrolling for fresh memes.
So universal is the phenomena that people of all social layers now seek to become its beneficiaries — from the snapback-wearing young gangstas #MLG looking for after-school entertainment to 40-year-old blue collars trying to exploit the culture to initiate behavior change.
In fact, one of the most flagrant meme abuse is the hip American anti tobacco commercial featuring youtubers and memetic characters screaming, “it’s a trap!” to teens smoking at a party.
If that PSA doesn’t have enough stopping power, look up the video clip ingeniously titled Left Swipe Dat to curb your urge to blaze a cig for good (Warning: due to the cringey nature of the video, watching may induce urge to smoke.)
Although experiencing meteoric rise only the past few years, the concept of meme really dates back to the year 1976. It was coined by a posh evolutionary biologist from Oxford University, who doubles as a militant atheist.
The plot thickens!
Professor Richard Dawkins is the godfather of memes. Not because he is capable of dropping the spiciest memes ever known to man, but because he was the originator of the word.
Unlike the popular usage of today, meme didn’t describe image macros laden with hilarious phrase written in impact typeface. It, instead, tries to explain the meaning of information being copied successfully from person to person (Susan Blackmore, Ted Talk 2008.)
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches,” says Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.
Any viral messages, picture-caption, intentional misspelling that are propagated on the internet are subsumed under the special category of internet meme.
The Selection
When an artist has a song in mind, she can transmit the tune to the brains of her listeners through Soundcloud or Spotify. If it is catchy enough, people could popularize it by declaring the song as generation-defining, or alternatively make it as a ripe breeding ground for viral parodies.
Either way, the legacy of the song lives on.
The ’87 UK smash hit Never Give You Up by the then up-and-coming British lad with a big (black guy’s) voice, Rick Astley is a good example.
Perhaps, for millennials, it’s a little bit hard to make peace with the idea that the energetic synth, trumpet and violin samples and melodic sensibility of the song once swayed entire globe off their feet.
The twenty first century internet trolls remember the song for a completely different reason.
In 2007, the song caught a second wind. Not for its musical qualities. But for its comedic usage in the form of bait and switch guerilla tactics aptly called rick-rolling.
All the while, other songs that failed to hit the charts are doomed to fade into irrelevance. This is the musical version of survival of the fittest. The melodic natural selection in action.
It turns out that the unforgiving principle Dawkins acknowledge in the animal kingdom also prevails in the realm of the abstract.
Natural selection made sure that only organisms well-adept to the environment can continue to spread their genes.
Memes, too, experience similar selection process. In the age of lightning fast information exchange, ideas compete for the attention of easily distracted modern people.
Thus, only the catchiest song, the most reliable app, the most used vernaculars and the dankest image-caption combination shall survive and be cultivated.
From this moment on, when you see any bad luck Brians, awkward seals, and confession bears, know that they the elite few.
In the volatile cyber world, only one rule stands. The survival of the dankest prevails!
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Follow me on twitter! @joedwinv| Follow on medium! Joseph Edwin
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Also! Enjoy Optimus Primus Yustisius, Rebecca Mohr writing on meme.
